Google "respected pollster" and "Palestinian" and you'll get quite a few hits leading to Khalil Shikaki, who is described as "the most respected Palestinian pollster." This view is shared by Tom Friemdman and other journalists who regularly soundite the head of the Ramallah-based Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research -- whose institute has received funding from American Foundations and who has served as an adviser to the U.S. government.

I go on to suggest that there is one major problem in leading respectability as a pollster: his polls. Shikaki conducted three crucial polls tht showed the moderate Fatah well ahead of the militant Hamas by a comfortable and growing margin on the eve of the Palestinian parliamentary elections in which Hamas won Big. The problem was thah Shikaki's polls helped reinforce expectations in Washington that Fatah would win, noting that his polls have become a font of conventional wisdom (CW) in Washington and elsewhere. They shouldn't, I argue, warning the recent CW promoted by Shikaki, that trends in Israeli and Palestinian opinion favor a new American efforts to launch a "peace process" are very misleading and shouldn't serve as a basis for constructing new U.S. initiatives.So... I wasn't very surprised to read in the new (April 15)issue of The Economist the following:

Paradoxically, though Palestinians have voted for extremism and many Israelis for unilateralism, some say the time for talks is propitious. Khalil Shikaki, a respected Palestinian pollster, says that a majority on both sides still wants talks, under the right conditions. But a lot will depend on who will be in Israel's ruling coalition, and whether they choose to encourage any glimmers of hope, or prefer Israel to go it alone.

I wasn't surprised because like Shikaki, The Economist has become a font of CW. And that's too bad because I think that since the magazine emerged in the 1990's as the leading organ of the ruling political and business elites of the Global Economy, a Davos Weekly, it has been starting to lose some of its pizzazz and has become kind of predictable (which is the worst thing that you could say about a weekly magazine). That means that what I'm now getting in The Economist is a concise summary of what's I've been reading all week in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times plus some nuggets from the Weekly Standard and The New Republic (all of which have referred to Shikaki as a "respected Palestinian pollster"). And, yes, as departing editor Bill Emmott notes in the new issue, the magazine's decision to support the American invasion of Iraq has been "the most controversial decision" of his editorship. Moreover, the British magazine continues to insist that America should "stay the course" in Iraq and seems to assume that America has the obligation to use its military power to spread democracy in the Middle East and worldwide. I do hope that the magazine whose classical liberal orientation I share will get a little bit more exciting, more original, more provocative under the new editor, John Micklethwait. He could start by refraining from carrying the CW of that "respected Palestinian pollster."

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5. Michael Oren's op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal on November 16 which is only accessible to subscribers. So here are a few interesting quotes:Much like 1967, Israel faces a Middle Eastern leader who has repeatedly sworn to wipe it off the map, and to that end is assiduously trying to acquire nuclear weapons. Like Nasser, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad can cripple Israel economically by keeping it in a state of alert, driving away foreign investment and tourism. In the absence of internationa…

A global affairs analyst, journalist, blogger, and author. I am a senior analyst at Wikistrat, teach political science at the University of Maryland, and cover Washington for the Singapore Business Times. I also write for Ha'aretz, blog at The Huffington Post, post commentaries on The National Interest, and am a contributing editor at The American Conservative.
Formerly a research fellow in at the Cato Institute and the United Nations correspondent for the Jerusalem Post, I have published in American and international newspapers and magazines, and have been affiliated with think tanks and academic institutions.
I authored "Quagmire: America in the Middle East" (Cato Institute, 1992) and of "Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
I have a Ph.D. in international relations from American University, and graduated from Columbia University with MA degrees from the schools of journalism and international affairs and a certificate from the Middle East Institute. I also graduated with an MA degrree in communication and received a BA degree in political science from Hebrew University.